1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to presentation capture and more specifically to devices for capturing media information from a presentation.
2. Background Art
There is currently a drive toward expanding the traditional classroom into online education. Students of the digital age, having grown up with on demand media of all kinds, have an expectation that classroom lectures and notes be similarly available on demand. Additionally, more and more students are enrolling in distance education programs or internet based courses which require remotely available lectures and class materials. Lecture capture, also known as presentation capture, is a major focus of this expansion.
Lecture capture involves the recordation and publishing of classroom lectures and related media. Current solutions are available, however there are continuing efforts to improve their form and functionality. For example, an accurate recreation of the in class environment is tantamount for students to get any use out of a captured lecture. Poor audio and video quality may be incomprehensible to a remote viewer. Even marginally inferior reproduction can dissuade a student from viewing a recorded lecture. Given this, capturing high quality content is extremely important and modern media and transmission formats need to be supported.
In addition, more flexibility is desired in presentation capture systems. Lecture halls and classrooms are not all created equal and do not all share the same uniform resources. For example, some large lecture halls are equipped with modern equipment such as digital video players and laptops, while others may contain more traditional equipment such as microphones and VCR's. Additionally, lecturers and presenters have individual preferences as to what resources they employ during a lecture. Some professors may believe in the educational power of the Powerpoint® presentation, whereas law professors rely strictly on the Socratic method and in class dialogues. A presentation capture system is desired that is flexible enough for many different classroom environments and professor preferences.
However, while more flexibility in media capabilities is desired in presentation capture, users also require simple operation. Certain prior art solutions that employ increased functionality are often high end systems that require a dedicated staff to deploy and maintain these systems. However, it is often the untrained professors that ultimately are the end users when recording individual lectures. As such, professors desire an automated lecture capture system that is simple enough for untrained personnel to use.
Given these concerns there is now a need for an improved lecture capture device. Such a device needs to be flexible regarding the inputs and outputs that it is capable of supporting. Additionally, the operation of such a device should be simple and require little to no training.